The most fun part about Strunk & White is its name. The rules of writing are never very entertaining, which is why editor and author Arthur Plotnik takes them on. Aileen Gallagher catches up with him about his point of view.

Mediabistro: Spunk & Bite has so much to think about and incorporate. What's your strategy on how to utilize the advice offered in your book?

Plotnik: I would say use it with delight. After all, my subject is the joy of spunky, expressive language, and how to exploit that joy so that competing writers are miserable. Take delight in that, and be inspired by the hundreds of spunky, bitey examples woven throughout. After Chapter One, which liberates writers from certain 50-year-old attitudes of Strunk and White [The Elements of Style], readers can roam at will through what might be called "prompts" toward more engaging writing; for example, toward capturing the extraordinary with "extreme metaphors," toward acquiring "edge," or putting pop imagery to work.

Several chapters-call them interactive if you can stand that term-offer diverting challenges: to nail the exact word, to improve an author's modifier, to rate authors' figures of speech. Readers who like a structured approach can follow the book's parts: flexibility, freshness, texture, word, force, form, clarity, and contemporaneity. But those who toe the chapters randomly will arrive at the same place.

Mediabistro: Language, like everything else, goes through trends. For example, a few years ago it seemed that everyone knew what schadenfreude meant and used it in their writing. Is trendy OK, or just a substitute for actual good writing?

Plotnik: Maybe people have dropped schadenfreude because they've stopped enjoying the misfortune of others. As if. But good writing is writing that engages and stimulates its audience according to the author's intent. In that context trendy words can be beautiful-as long as they're fresh, apt, inventive, and surprising to the readership. If you add "enduring" to those criteria that's another story, since trendy locutions grow cringey faster than one can say, "you go, girl."

Words have funny cycles, though. They can rise from cringey to nostalgic or retro and even wind up as fixtures in the language. In The Elements of Style, E. B. White declared that "by the time this paragraph sees print, psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky will be the words of yesteryear." That was 46 years ago, and, dude, they all six still be funky. The trick for authors is to gauge the life of a trendy locution against its window of exposure. A daily columnist has it easy. A novelist has to ponder, will anything rock for my readers five years from now? If not, then it's time to quarry up an enduring, if less titillating, standard term.